Masterworks Research · July 2026

Data & Research | Reading the Market

The one number everyone quotes for the size of the art market comes from this report. Here is how that number is built, and what it can and cannot tell you.

The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report is the annual study that sizes the global art market, written by the cultural economist Dr. Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics and published each spring. The 2026 edition, released on March 12, 2026, put total global art sales at $59.6 billion in 2025, up 4% year over year after two straight years of decline [1][2][3]. That $59.6 billion is the figure you see cited almost everywhere the size of the art market comes up, so it is worth knowing exactly what it counts and how.

For an investor, the report is the closest thing the art market has to a set of national accounts. It is genuinely useful, and it is a modelled estimate built partly on a voluntary survey. Both of those things are true at once, and reading it well means holding both.

What is the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report?

The report is a yearly benchmark of the entire global art trade, covering galleries, dealers, auction houses, and fairs, set against the macro backdrop of wealth and the economy [4]. The 2026 edition is the tenth in the series, and the cadence is steady: it comes out around March and covers the prior calendar year [4]. McAndrew's firm, Arts Economics, does the empirical work; Art Basel and UBS commission and distribute it.

What makes it distinct is scope. Most art data covers only auctions, because auction results are public. The New York Times describes the report as the sole extensive analysis that combines both auction and dealer sales at a global scale [3]. That coverage of the private, dealer side is the report's real value, and, as we will get to, the source of most of its uncertainty.

What the 2025 numbers actually say

The headline is a market that returned to growth, led from the top. The $59.6 billion total came on roughly 41.5 million transactions [1]. The structure underneath breaks down cleanly:

  • Dealers and galleries: about $34.8 billion, up 2%, roughly 58% of the market [1][2].
  • Public auctions: about $20.7 billion, up 9%, roughly 35% [1][2].
  • Private sales at auction houses: just under $4.2 billion, down about 4 to 5%, the remaining 7% [1][3].

Two patterns matter for an investor. The recovery was concentrated at the high end. The value of work selling for $1 million or more rose 21%, and work above $10 million rose about 30%, with the top segment restoring its share of total value to roughly 54% [2][5]. That is the market behaving the way we would expect coming out of a correction, with the biggest, best works leading. Prices at the very top are a call option on the wealthiest collectors, and in 2025 that option was firmly in the money.

Geography is the other striking feature. The United States, United Kingdom, and China together made up 76% of sales by value, with the US alone at 44%, around $26 billion [2][5]. The US accounted for 78% of the global market for work sold above $10 million, and every one of the top 10 lots of the year sold in New York [2][5]. If you want to understand where the high end trades, it trades in a handful of rooms in Manhattan.

A few other readings worth keeping. Art fairs grew to 35% of dealer turnover, the highest since 2022, which is part of why the Art Basel fairs matter as much as they do [2]. Online-only sales fell to $9.2 billion, the lowest since 2019, as high-end buying moved back to in-person [5]. And by category, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work jumped 47% in value while Post-War and Contemporary slipped again, a reminder that "the art market" is really many markets moving on different clocks.

How the report is built

How that number is assembled tells you how much weight it can bear.

The $59.6 billion comes from three inputs. Public auction sales come from published results, which are the firmest data in the whole exercise. Private auction-house sales are estimated, because the houses disclose them only partially. And the dealer number, the largest single piece at $34.8 billion, is built from a voluntary survey of about 1,650 galleries, then scaled up to represent the far larger global population of dealers [3]. Add the three together and you get the headline.

We have a particular appreciation for this problem, because we ran into the same wall. When we set out to measure how much art actually appreciates, there was no clean dataset to buy. We hired dozens of interns and bought thousands of paper auction catalogs to build one by hand. The art market simply does not come with an API. So we read McAndrew's work with real respect for how hard the private-market half is to estimate at all.

It also helps to be precise about what the report measures. It measures market size, meaning turnover, the total dollar value of art that changed hands. It does not measure returns. Knowing that $59.6 billion of art traded tells you nothing about whether owning art made anyone money. For that you need a repeat-sale index, which tracks the same work across multiple sales to isolate pure price change, the way Robert Shiller built the Case-Shiller home price index. The report and an index answer two different questions. One sizes the market. The other tells you how it performed. Confusing the two is the most common mistake made with this data.

What to trust, and what to discount

Treat the report as a slow, reliable compass. It is good for direction and weak on precision, for a few specific reasons.

The figures are nominal, not adjusted for inflation, which flatters the market over time and can turn a real decline into a reported flat year [6]. If you are comparing across several years, deflate the numbers yourself. The whole thing is also converted into US dollars, so a strong dollar can shrink the reported size of Europe and Asia even when local activity held up. And it is an annual snapshot released months after the year it covers, so by the time it confirms a turn, much of that turn has already happened. It is not a trading signal.

The deeper caution is the one the report's own coverage raises. Because the dealer figure rests on a self-selected survey, it leans toward the galleries most willing and able to respond, which skews to the larger, fair-active, blue-chip end. The New York Times notes that some experts question the report's conclusions precisely because they rest on self-reported data from a limited dealer sample [3]. That does not make the number wrong. It makes it an estimate with error bars that nobody can quite draw. The clearest proof is that the TEFAF report, built on a different methodology by the economist Rachel Pownall, routinely lands on a different total [3]. When two serious studies of the same market disagree, the honest read is that any single market-size figure is an approximation.

This is the same family of problem we write about in how sample selection bias distorts published art returns. Who is in the sample shapes the answer, and in art the sample is rarely random.

What the report means for an investor

Use it for what it is good at. The report is the best available read on the shape of the market: how big it is, how it splits between dealers and auctions, where it trades, and which segments are leading or lagging. The 2025 edition tells a coherent story that lines up with what the auction rooms and the fairs were saying, namely that the three-year correction ended and the recovery is being led by the top of the market.

Do not use it to judge whether art is a good investment, or to time anything. For the return question, look to a repeat-sale index and to long-run correlation data. Art's correlation to equities over long periods runs near zero, and its closest relationship is with gold, around 0.1 to 0.2. That is the case for owning some, and the report neither makes nor breaks it.

Read together with the report, our own view is that the 2025 data is consistent with the early innings of a recovery, concentrated where recoveries in this market usually start, at the very top. We believe that repricing has further to run. Past performance is not predictive, the sample has its biases, and we will know for certain only in hindsight. But the compass is pointing the way we thought it would.

Sources

  1. UBS. "Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026." UBS, March 2026. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/art/art-market-research.html
  2. Art Basel. "The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026." Art Basel, March 2026. https://www.artbasel.com/stories/the-art-basel-and-ubs-global-art-market-report-2026
  3. The New York Times. "The global art market, according to the Art Basel and UBS report." The New York Times, March 12, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/arts/design/global-market-art-basel-ubs-report.html
  4. Art Basel and Arts Economics. "The Art Market 2026." theartmarket.artbasel.com, March 2026. https://theartmarket.artbasel.com/
  5. Observer. "Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026: key takeaways." Observer, March 2026. https://observer.com/2026/03/art-basel-ubs-art-market-report-2026-global-art-market-report/
  6. MutualArt. "Facing the facts on the Art Basel and UBS report." MutualArt, 2025. https://www.mutualart.com/Article/Facing-the-Facts-on-The-Art-Basel---UBS-/91F766F417A03BCF
  7. LLB Auction. "Reading the market." LLB Auction Insights, 2026. https://www.llb-auction.com/insights/the-market-in-motion/reading-the-market